I just signed a petition calling for Norwegian universities to use research expertise on AI when deciding how to implement it, rather than having decisions be made mostly administratively. , If you are a researcher in Norway, please read it and sign it if you agree – and share with anyone else who might be interested. The petition was written by three researchers at UiT: Maria Danielsen (a philosopher who completed her PhD in 2025 on AI and ethics, including discussions of art and working life), Knut Ørke (Norwegian as a second language), and Holger Pötzsch (a professor of media studies with many years of research on digital media, video games, disruption, and working life, among other topics). This is not about preventing researchers from exploring AI methods in their research. It is about not uncritically accepting the hype that everyone must use AI everywhere without critical reflection. It is about not introducing Copilot as the default option in word processors, or training PhD candidates to believe they will fall behind if they do not use AI when writing articles, without proper academic discussion. Changes like these should be knowledge-based and discussed academically, not merely decided administratively, because they alter the epistemological foundations of research. Maria wrote to me a couple of months ago because she had read my opinion piece in Aftenposten in which I called for a strong brake on the use of language models in knowledge work. She was part of a committee tasked with developing UiT’s AI strategy and was concerned because there was so much hype and so few members of the committee with actual expertise in AI. I fully support the petition. There are probably some good uses for AI in research, but the uncritical, hype-driven insistence that we must simply adopt it everywhere is highly risky. There are many researchers in Norway with strong expertise in AI, language, ethics, working life, and culture. We must make use of this expertise. This is also partly about respect for research in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and law. Introducing AI at universities and university colleges is not merely a technical issue, and perhaps not even primarily a technical one. It concerns much more: philosophy of science, methodological reflection, epistemology, writing, publishing, the working environment, and more. […]
Liz
Well, Cryptonomicon tells a tale along those lines, but I didn’t know how much of it was Stephenson’s literary license, and how much was fact.
Norman
When Anne Moir, a biologist, told one of her friends she was preparing “Brainsex”, a book for non specialists that summarises the enormous amount of readily available evidence which helps explain how and why male and female brains are different, she was cautioned against the dangers of writing such a book.
Since no one seems to read it, her friend’s fears proved overstated. Sadly, this obvious starting point for understanding WHY there may be differences between the sexes is “out of bounds”. The current fad is to insist on pretending nature plays no significant role, and then try to assign everything to nurture.
Once the zeitgeist assigned everything to nature, which was just as absurd; but then they had the excuse of the evidence not being as clear and convincing as it was by Moir & Jessel’s time.
Jesper Juul
I think that the thing about contacting a lost one via machines is entirely made up.
I recently read Martin Davis: “The Universal Computer” (2000) which describes the history of the computer as mathematical development from Leibniz, Boole, Frege, Cantor, Hilbert, Gˆdel, to Turing. Aa Davis describes it, the Turing machine is a theoretical construct used to prove that you cannot make an algorithm for solving the entscheidungsproblem (whether a given proposition can be proven according from a set of premises – if I understand it correctly :).
The Turing reference is “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (1936).
There appears to be no reference to communication anywhere in this – is it really doing anybody any good to make up these things? Imagine the disappointment of someone (regardless of sex) who like fairy tales but dislikes math & logic when they get to look at what computer science is actually like.
Or imagine the people who like math & logic but dislikes fairy tales who are turned away from computer science due to a misleading story like this one…
join-the-dots
digitales 2003